Chapter 1
Introduction
Energy has played a very special role in many social debates that have taken place over the last 50 years. Examples include the debates on the use of nuclear power, major sources of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and the possibility of a transition away from finite fossil resources to a sustainable system of energy supply. Quite often the topical debates on energy issues have stumbled over quite general questions on the role of private and public institutions and the policies behind the ongoing development in our societies. This catalytic effect from the specific to the general may appear surprising, but clues to the reasons for its appearance may include on one hand that energy is offering a finite set of issues much more accessible for public debate (and thus easier to start getting involved in before generalizing to a broader scope), and on the other hand the recurrent experience of sustainable solutions being blocked by the existing rules of economic and political thinking, making people reflect on the possibility of arranging society and its money flows in ways more amenable to democratic control and change.
These reflections have a particular relevance to people like the author of this book, who has spent a lifetime in research related to energy issues covering nearly the entire catalog of energy options. The question of economic assessment has come up again and again, for example in connection with comparing renewable and fossil energy systems. For fossil energy plants, the capital cost is often small and the main expense is the fuels that have to be purchased throughout the lifetime of the plant. For renewable energy plants, the up-front capital costs dominate, and only by using a present-value comparison is a fair evaluation of the relative merits of the two types of energy system possible. Most decision-makers have learned this but there is a snag: the present-value calculation depends on the interest rate employed and it is of course unknown for the future part of the system life. For this reason, an overestimate is often employed ‘to be on the safe side’, implying that the economy of the renewable energy system will appear less attractive than it is.
Moving to demand-side energy investments the situation is even worse, because many consumers do not know how to compare purchases serving the same purpose but having different service lifetimes. For this reason, many consumers will fall for the cheaper product, typically produced in a developing country, although only the sales price is cheaper, not the levelized cost over identical periods of use. Typically, the lifetime of a product made in a developing economy is three to eight times shorter than that of a similar product from an established producer in a long-time industrialized country, and thus requiring three to eight successive purchases versus just one. The real cost comparison would therefore in nearly all cases favor the product with a higher initial outlay, whereas the economic interest of the industry and its commercial sales outlets typically is the opposite one.
It is a fundamental shortcoming of our educational system that primary schools have not taught children to calculate life-cycle prices and compare purchases with different service lives but serving the same purpose. The examples above derive from cases where better knowledge of a small segment of known economic procedures could have solved the problem. However, there are also cases, where the current economic paradigm is not just being misused by amateurs but faces fundamental shortcomings. The following chapters will address some of these and discuss various ways out of the problems. First the current paradigm will be described in some detail, then historical and new proposals for remedying the situation will be presented, together with identifying obstacles for implementing some of the solutions. Finally, a scenario combining all the ingredients will be outlined for the reader’s consideration, reflection and possibly criticism.
The investigation of the role of economic paradigms in society will necessarily lead to excursions in several directions other than economic theory, including discussion of physical and intellectual resources and lifestyles and social organization at both local, regional, and global scale. Concrete examples or case studies of past dealings with the issues will be presented, including a fairly detailed discussion of the energy use in specific sectors. Vague concept such as “growth” will have to be disassembled into components characterized by having positive, neutral, or negative impacts, and the entire range of human activities will be reassessed in light of general considerations of sustainability and of the distribution of benefits and burdens, leading to discussions of disparity in welfare, political power structures and tolerance toward variations in human preferences and choices. The bottom line, as first emphasized by ecologists, is that everything seems connected and that partial solutions may not lead to optimization of the fate of the entire human community embedded into the constraint of a finite, small planet.
The ambition to “solve” all the problems identified during this odyssey is of course impossible, although trying is not necessarily the worst approach. A more attainable goal may be to create a framework for a qualified debate of the issues raised, which can inspire others to contribute to the many gaps in the arguments of this modest attempt to flag the problems. This is certainly felt to be needed, considering that professional politicians in most parts of the world do not spend any time questioning the neoliberal paradigm underlying the running of nearly all societies of the present world (whether denoted conservative or socialist/labor), and despite voices from an increasing mass of knowledgeable people expressing their doubts. My aim has been to get to the roots of these issues, which has led me to question whether we actually have democracies beyond the mere use of the name and whether the basic rules presently embedded into constitutions and declarations of human rights are sufficient and if they are reflected in the actual execution of governance.
My suggestion is that human rights gain weight when they are connected with human duties and, in light of how governance is conducted in different parts of the world, we probably need to restart the discussion of democracy from the bottom. This includes a new consideration of the pros and cons of direct and representative democracy, where the representative democracy seen today has developed in a covert activity conducted by a small group of professional politicians, backed by a small elite group and elected by advertising campaigns carefully choosing and avoiding issues to be exposed to the voters. This often subsequently leads to ruling by massive misinformation and blocking of relevant information, thus increasingly alienating the population and blurring the distinction between democracies and other political set-ups of oligarchic or dictatorial form.
The question is raised of whether we should continue the motion toward one world, forcing trade, commerce, and other interaction to be globalized despite the different speeds of development evident in different parts of the same world. Could there not be benefits of having a different organization in different parts of the world, just as each region obviously has different views on the basic objectives and different claims on what constitutes the human predicament. If so, it would need to be sorted out, which playing rules need to be globally imposed in order to peacefully share the planet and which can be left to individual societies to shape according to their preferences and state of development.
A general audience book exploring the political implications of the analysis made in this work is available (Sørensen, 2016).
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